Guided Thought | William Batten

One of the curious things about the architecture of conversations – a model that’s at the heart of Conversation Hacker – is how widely applicable it is.

Think buying or serving coffee isn’t a ‘real conversation’?

Well, you might be right.

And yet human nature doesn’t change just because it’s transactional.

It might be short, artificial and constrained, but placing your order still counts as a conversation.

Which means the architecture of conversation still applies.

Sure, you can get away with mumbling “skinny mocha latte”, handing over your credit card and calling it a day. Lots of other folk do that, so it’s acceptable only because it’s normal.

It works the other way, too. Taking someone’s order doesn’t require you to think of them as a human being.

But…

Even in such a short interaction, you can still use the power of conversation. And, no, I don’t mean you be that guy or gal who holds up the line, telling an Abraham Simpson-style story.

This can be just as fast as everyone else.

And about thirty times as fun and charismatic.

In fact, it’s great training for more natural conversations. If you can get your baristas or customers to open up and engage with you, you can do it with anyone.

There are two nice side effects to this sort of practice:

Firstly: better tips or service. Folks like folks who are polite and interested.

Secondly: you might just make their day. How different would things be if everyone got a little more care and positive attention in their lives?

Something to ponder while you see the results for yourself.

You can download Conversation Hacker here:

https://guided-thought.com/hacker

If you’ve enjoyed (or not) more video teleconferencing than usual lately, you’ve probably heard someone say something like this:

“Okay, so, I know this meeting is running a little long, so I won’t take up too much of your time, but I want to quickly raise something and I’ll be fast about it because I’m sure we’re all busy and you want to get on with your day…”

From a logical point of view, this is utterly meaningless.

Worse – the person is saying they’ll be quick but, if they really valued speed, they could skip all of that.

What’s going on?

When folks ramble like that, it’s often a sign of anxiety.

And, well, I’m sure that’s a factor here.

Anxiety is generally up, and communicating over these technologies tends to make folks more anxious than face-to-face meetings.

But that’s not the full story.

See, a rambling preamble like that conveys no information in the words.

But it’s far from meaningless.

To put it in engineering terms, most folks see the words as data, whereas the voice is the carrier signal. The voice is just there to get the data across and you could replace it with some other signal without losing anything.

That’s not what we see though.

People talk differently over Zoom than in real life.

That’s because the signal and the data are the other way around.

The data is in the voice.

The chosen words are the signal.

That’s (partly) why folks ramble like this over video conferencing. The vast majority of communication happens non-verbally – through body language, vocal inflection and so forth.

Over a fuzzy, low-frame rate video link – or, worse, a voice-only link – most of your data channels are degraded.

The only way to feel as heard as usual is to use more words to say the same amount of stuff.

It’s amazing what you notice when you know what to look for.

Folks say humans are irrational. I disagree – everything we do serves one or more of our needs, even if that need isn’t obvious or healthy.

If someone’s behaviour confuses or surprises you, the problem’s on your end, not theirs. Just because you can’t see the logic, that doesn’t mean their crazy – it means you’re not looking.

Fortunately, you can learn to see more and say more.

To forge deeper relationships with people, no matter the medium.

All with a simple set of formulas, as powerful as they are flexible.

Here’s how:

https://guided-thought.com/hacker

Nothing is pure art.

Everything is learnable.

If you look at someone and wish you could be more like them… great! The good news is you can learn how.

It can seem strange if you’re the sort of person who gets stuck in your mind a lot. You can see others naturally go with the flow in conversations, while you find yourself overthinking everything.

So everything comes out awkward and clumsy.

You might wonder what you’re doing wrong.

The answer?

Nothing – but you are doing things differently.

Everything from greetings to small talk to deep-and-meaningfuls follows a set of guidelines. Most folks aren’t conscious of them – it’s partly instinct, partly unconscious mimicry.

And that’s okay – when you consciously apply them, you might even end up being more charismatic than everyone following their gut.

Plus it gives that overactive brain of yours something to chew on during the slow parts of the conversation.

When you learn about conversational architecture, you’ll be amazed how simple, powerful and versatile it is. You can use it when you buy a coffee, make sales and enjoy pillow talk with your soulmate.

I know not everyone wants a simple formula for supercharging conversations.

But if you do?

You’ll find it worth your while to check this out:

https://guided-thought.com/hacker

Let’s unpack this, shall we?

In the Original Trilogy… sure, maybe.

I mean, it’s not likely – he was too cynical and self-interested to become a warrior/priest/monk.

But the Force flows through all living things.

He might not have had Luke’s natural advantages or the right attitude, but was there anything stopping him from learning how to, as they say, use the Force?

The movies don’t rule it out.

In the Prequel Trilogy, this interesting and realistic take gets a slight tweak:

“No. Midichlorians. I hate sand and only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

Right… so joining this military order depends on the purity of your blood. Thanks for that elaboration, Lucas. It feels like the Harry Potter series’ take on blood purity, run in reverse.

The Sequel Trilogy also sheds some light on this:

The Force manifests in between the Force and midichlorians when it comes to Sith and Jedi.

(If you’re struggling to make sense of that, it’s because I wrote three interesting sentences and then mashed them together at random, in the spirit of that trilogy.)

Anyway…

This might not be the clearest way to show how the franchise decayed.

But it’s yet another sign of it.

It’s funny to apply these different interpretations to our world:

Want angel investors? You first need a blood test to see if you’re related to Gates or Zuckerberg.

That’s not a richer world – that’s a weird, stunted and boring place to live.

Take that idea and toss it. If you want to do something or become something? Then do it. Will some folks have a natural advantage over others? Sure, but if someone with no legs can scale Everest, realise your limits are much higher than you sometimes think.

Of course, that’s real easy to say. “Achieve everything, even the impossible stuff!” What do you do if you believe that… but don’t know where to start?

Which is quite reasonable, really.

The thing is, you’ve almost certainly heard the answer:

Level up your people stills.

You don’t need to know Jedi mind tricks – all you need is a framework for what conversations actually for.

Here’s what many people forget: conversations aren’t exchanges of information. They test and build social connections, whether with strangers or people you know intimately.

Often, all it takes is a quick hey-how’s-it-going to tell when someone’s not in the mood to talk to you.

It goes deeper than that.

Almost every conversation – from ordering coffee to pillow talk with your soul mate – follows the same guidelines.

These guidelines, baked into your unconscious thanks to your pack hunter ancestry, show who is a good pack member and who isn’t.

Break these rules and people will think there’s something off about you, even if what you said ‘makes sense’.

Follow the guidelines consciously, though?

You’ll know when and with whom you can take the conversation where you want it to go… and have them like you for it.

I lay it all out in Conversation Hacker:

https://guided-thought.com/hacker

Stop me if this sounds familiar:

You have some goal or milestone.

You want a new home, a partner, more money, more freedom, to travel more.

Through hard work, patience and a smidge of luck, you get it…

… only to find that gnawing sensation is still there. You thought that reaching this goal would soothe that, but it didn’t. That sense of frustration, emptiness or incompleteness still lingers.

How could you be so wrong about what you want?

At a simple level, this comes from your addiction to narratives. Something feels off in your life, you’re single, so you tell yourself a story that having a partner will make everything feel right.

Maybe it will.

But how do you know?

Wouldn’t it be nice to know what’s really missing before you chase it?

Therein lies the rub, pendo. Anything you think about what your life needs is simply part of your narrative. Whether it’s right or wrong comes down to luck more than anything.

Imagine spending decades chasing riches, when all you really needed was a community you could belong to.

So… what do you do?

Put your narratives aside and talk to your unconscious.

I don’t mean dream analysis, which is just putting a narrative to the churnings of your unconscious self.

I don’t mean going with your gut.

Those can help, I guess, but if you really want to know what you want, you have to have a conversation with your unconscious.

This isn’t like trying to interpret cryptic omens from distant heavens. It’s like sitting in a room with your wisest, most capable self and having a chat.

Not sure how to do that?

Not many folks do, which is why it’s part of my Platinum Coaching program.

Figuring out what you really want is just the start… but that alone is worth the investment. After all, it could save you a lifetime of wrong turns and unsatisfying victories.

When you know what you want – what you really want – you’ll surprise yourself with just how quickly you can begin to find it.

Sign up here:

https://guided-thought.com/appointment

Sometimes, clients I see achieve incredible, instant and permanent results.

They immediately make the change that was so difficult before. They learn to relax, they quit smoking, they overcome anxiety – end of story.

When that happens, it’s great for everyone. They get what they want and I can focus on the next thing.

I don’t aim for that, though.

I assume there’ll be setbacks.

Times when the change falls apart.

For one thing, it sets a more realistic expectation. How many folks quit smoking, then never smoke again? Not many – more will relapse here and there.

And that’s okay.

In fact, that’s part of the process.

Knowing you can handle setbacks is better than not experiencing them, like learning how to make money is better than being rich.

Take smokers, for example. I hear this story all the time: they quit for about six months, then light up in a moment of weakness. Then they decide that this means they’re no longer a non-smoker, so they start smoking again.

Bah – you’re allowed to succumb to temptation here and there. You’re allowed to feel overwhelmed, feel anxiety or smoke a single cigarette.

This is how you build real change.

By managing yourself at these moments, you can experience them less. Like a tree, you grow taller by growing deeper.

That’s why, in my programs, I not only hypnotically install more useful mental habits into your unconscious – I bolster you against the moments when you slip. If you never need to know how to bounce back, great. If you do, then it can stop you from sliding back into old habits.

It’s also why my programs have such robust guarantees. If you find yourself needing some assistance years later, then you’ll get it as part of the program.

When you leave a session with me, your mind clear and your energies flowing, it can feel great.

That feeling can stay with you for a long time.

If it fades, though, it’s good to know your changes will carry on anyway.

So sign up for a session:

https://guided-thought.com/appointment

I’m not the first person to say your most important sense-organ is your brain.

Sure, you need intact eyeballs to see. The amount of processing your brain has to do, though, is spectacular.

Feed raw optical nerve data into a monitor and you’d get a blurry, twitchy mess. The brain does a lot to make sense of all that – to translate jumbled electrical impulses into vision.

If you’ve heard that before, you’re not impressed.

So let’s take this out of the realm of curious factoids and ask ourselves… what can we do with this?

Here’s something:

A while ago, I started doing some visual memory exercises. I soon noticed my vision became sharper – much sharper. Then I slacked on the exercise, my vision returned to normal, then I got back into them and my vision improved again.

Training visual memory improved my visual resolution.

Will that happen to you too? Is it all in my head? Does that even make sense?

Eh, I don’t know. As long as it keeps working, I don’t care.

That makes me… not rare as such, but at least uncommon.

Humans are addicted to narratives. It’s one of our greatest strengths and weaknesses. For example, it’s hard for people to accept that something works without knowing why – even if the ‘reason’ is nonsense.

Don’t believe me?

Even scientists – who should follow the data before anything else – do this. Hypnosis was doing things that science at the time called impossible. It did them consistently and skilled hypnotists outperformed convincing amateurs, so it wasn’t all about the show.

Still, no one knew why. The best explanations involved ‘something to do with magnets, I guess?’ which were quickly disproven.

When the proposed explanations were disproven, they then decided the phenomena were disproven.

It wasn’t until we could peak inside living brains and watch them shift states that hypnosis gained acceptance. A century of clear evidence wasn’t enough without a satisfying story to explain it.

Obviously, I’m generalising here. The people who could think like scientists followed the evidence, whether it made sense to them a not. Then and now, more folks call themselves scientists than think scientifically.

It’s weird, it’s even a shame, but this gives you an advantage.

If you stop listening to stories and start looking at what the universe is telling you, you can find wonderful things that are right in front of you.

That includes hypnosis because, yes, many folks still doubt what it can do. They say things like, “that seems mystical and mysticism isn’t science, therefore it’s not real,” then pat themselves on the back for their genius reasoning skills.

The irony?

Clever use of hypnosis can help you see what is, not what is said.

In the spirit of that, experience it for yourself here:

https://guided-thought.com/appointment

I’m reading a biography of William Stephenson.

Who was he and what did he do, you ask? That’s not so easy to answer.

The short answer was he was Churchill’s intelligence chief in World War 2. Or something like that – I haven’t gotten to that part yet.

The long answer… well… think of some major event that happened in the first half of the 20^th Century. He was probably somehow involved, either predicting it, causing it, trying to prevent it, using it or learning from it.

It’s a weird read. In between helping found the BBC and helping invent television, he was building a private spy network – because the British Government of the day had no interest in such ungentlemanly conduct.

This is how he saw World War 2 coming, even in the so-called peaceful era after the so-called war to end all wars.

Britain of the 1920s and ‘30s didn’t want war, so anyone who warned of it was dismissed as a crackpot.

A warmonger.

I’m sure today they’d be called a conspiracy theorist.

Stephenson was part of a group, which included the then-political pariah Winston Churchill, warning folks about the militarisation of Germany.

As a businessman and steel magnate, he had good relationships with many Germans in the military and industry. He listened as German generals told him about blitzkrieg. He kept his eyes open as he toured factories that produced weapons of war, disguised as crop-dusting planes and consumer goods.

When he passed this information on, people chose not to believe it. They knew those factories – factories they hadn’t even seen – were making cars and lawnmowers. The alternative would be going to war in the future and they didn’t want that.

Hitler annexed Czechoslovakia and people still said all he wanted was peace.

Thank goodness history doesn’t repeat itself.

Thank goodness people aren’t pointing out obvious looming problems and being ridiculed for it.

That would mean we’ve learned nothing and that we’re not as smart, wise and unified as we think.

Oh well.

As usual, you have your choice of moves here.

You can moan about how the human race is doomed – that we had a good run.

You can fashion the most scathing meme of your enemies. Just wait to everyone sees how dumb they really are.

Or…

You can do something that’ll make a difference.

You can aim high and seek to change to world.

The odds are against you, sure – but if everyone works to avoid the rising catastrophes, then we have a chance together. We’ve survived every crisis until now and averted more problems than history could record, so why not aim to do that again?

And who knows, maybe you do have the aura of destiny about you. Maybe you’re the next Churchill, leading your people through to the other side of their greatest challenge yet.

There’s only one way to find out:

Go for it.

Be the best you can.

Embrace everything you have, you are and you will do.

But if you think it’ll take more than what you can bring right now… you need Platinum Coaching. If your best isn’t enough to knock the future onto a better course, then be better than your best.

Dig deep, find your true power when you sign up here:

https://guided-thought.com/appointment

Bring up NLP and you’ll get a few responses:

“Isn’t that that thing where you analyse text using computers?” That’s natural language processing – although you’re not wrong, since that’s also NLP.

“Isn’t it that thing where you, like, mimic someone’s body language to get them to like you?”

Or,

“Isn’t it that weird hypnosis thing?”

Not as such, no.

There are plenty of techniques associated with NLP. Certain language patterns and physical gestures come right out of the playbook of any intro to it.

And, yes, a lot of those techniques are hypnotic.

But those techniques, whether or not they work for you, aren’t NLP.

Neurolinguistic programming is the study and replication of experiences. These techniques came out of the field, perhaps, but they aren’t the field.

A meal isn’t the chef who made it.

Yesterday, I talked about tactics. I wasn’t talking on the behavioural level – the techniques that an expert uses to achieve a goal. I was talking on the mental level – the neurological level.

What goes on inside their head.

What they think and what they perceive.

Nail that and it’s easier to learn their mysterious ways, even when they don’t know how they do it themselves. When you can read and decode someone’s mental tactics, their gut instincts become clear.

It works the other way, too. When you struggle with something and it’s not clear why, the answer lies in how you think and what you notice, before you even notice what you notice.

This is how even weak advice like “look on the bright side!” can work (I say ‘can’). It changes what you focus on, which changes everything else.

Used with greater artistry and sophistication, this approach can unravel your problems at their source. Imagine hearing exactly what you need to hear to unleash your potential.

Then imagine hearing it every week for six months.

This isn’t the only thing you’ll experience if you sign up for Platinum Coaching. Even if it was, though, you’d find it more than worth your time and effort.

If you’re ready to change – really change – then sign up for your first session here:

https://guided-thought.com/appointment

I remember the easiest client I ever worked with.

They were young and had a lot going for them. They’d build a successful business for themselves, they’d studied, they’d travelled, they had friends…

What they struggled with?

Approaching folks they found attractive.

It was funny, because they were clearly a catch. They even knew it. Knowing it didn’t stop them feeling nervous or awkward about going up to a cute stranger and starting a conversation though.

We talked for a little while, then I asked the simple question:

“Why don’t you approach romance the way you approach your business?”

Boom, that’s all it took. Just like that, they not only found it easy to ask the hotties out – they found it exciting.

It’s not always this easy. Yet, at the heart of it, this is most of what I do. Someone has a set of tactics that don’t work for them, so I help them change.

This isn’t about giving advice. I’m not qualified to tell you how to live your life. I mean, who is a better expert in you than you?

I help you another way – by working on the level of your tactics.

Advice consists of a series of plans. “You should do more X and less Y.”

Tactics are about what you do in the moment.

You have tactics for getting out of bed, for thinking creatively, for unwinding after a long day, for handling difficult people, for working productively…

This is great news. You might not be able to change who you are, but you can change your tactics. Tactics are just actions, after all, and you can do things differently at any time.

Here’s where the news is not-so-great.

Most of your tactics are automatic to the point of being unconscious. Even if you’re great at introspection, you won’t know how you do most of what you do. Even for the few tactics you understand – even if you understand them accurately – how do you swap them out for ones that are better?

Back to the great news:

That’s where I come in.

When we have a conversation, I can map out and rewire your tactics on the go.

That’s why I sometimes pause and smile while we talk. It’s also why I ask strange questions.

It’s not because it’s weird – that happens to be a bonus.

Talk to successful people and they’ll tell you they’re nothing special. There’s no aura of destiny, genius or magic about them – they’re normal folks with relatable problems. They just happen to think and do things differently.

Think and do things more like them, and you’ll get results more like them.

It’s not about replacing your personality with theirs. That wouldn’t work and I wouldn’t recommend it if it did – that sounds boring. Tactics, though, are the little differences that make the big differences.

Again, talk to successful people and they’ll tell you how vital the little habits and simple perspectives are.

Reading their books and taking their classes might help a bit.

Getting inside their heads and trying out their tactics will transform everything.

With Platinum Coaching, you won’t get context-free and questionable advice – you’ll get new ways to think, perceive and be, over 28 one-on-one sessions, plus other goodies.

Here’s the link:

https://guided-thought.com/appointment/